Thursday, 2 August 2012

Of Rags and Riches - So You've Decided to Graduate

What a sorry time it is to be a young
person in Britain today! An education which would previously have
gotten you within a stone's throw of the Times rich list now has
twenty-somethings scrambling for retail assistant jobs in high street
stores. And what a life awaits those who net the elusive offer of
employment from the benevolent franchise conglomerate. What you
convinced yourself was a stopgap eventually becomes a career
trajectory, as you backwards rationalise over depressing wine-fuelled
dinners with your parents that your aspirations at University to
contribute something of value were unrealistic. But fuck – at least
you're employed, you're one of the lucky ones.

The unemployed, meanwhile, are
experiencing early onset of the kind of life-beaten cynicism on par
with Al Swearengen's maxim that until death's solace envelops, 'you
got more punishment in store.' Sold the snake-oil lie by
corporate-minded and managed universities that anyone without a
degree might as well get used to the taste of spam and baked beans on
toast for the rest of their lives, they move back in with their
parents, thumbing through the classifieds, obsessively tinkering with
their LinkedIn profiles in the hopes that they can at least find
something that stops them having to queue up with alcoholics and
burglars to get the pittance in unemployment benefits. And now the
anointed Etonians are charging you £27,000 in tuition for a rag
that's not worth the paper it's printed on. What a fucking scheme,
Bernie Madoff must be kicking himself.

To give some context which I hope will
not sound too self-indulgent - I have a 2.1 law degree and am
expecting to graduate from my LLM with distinction in two months'
time from one of the UK's top ten universities. I have a wide variety
of extra-curricular activities I undertook whilst at University,
including two separate editorial positions on the University
newspaper - my extra-curricular activities alone make my CV an extra page or so longer. Furthermore, I have an academic publication under my belt, as well as a fairly
prestigious award which I received after winning an international
essay competition. Ordinarily this would be a promising CV for a
graduate - a sure-fire route to employment in a meritocracy, yet I'm
struggling to even find unpaid internships. Paid work is so elusive
it might as well be a galloping beast with wings on its sides and a golden horn in the middle of its
head.

My experience is not unique. Young people in Britain today are, taken as a whole, over-educated for the jobs most of them end up doing. Not that education is a bad thing - everyone should read a book or two at some point in their lives - but never before has this country had so much wasted potential. The drive to get more young Britons into higher education was, we were told, supposed to create a new generation of ultra-skilled workers and thinkers. Britain would be to the 21st century what Baghdad was to the 10th; an intellectual utopia where merit maketh the man and social immobility would be an arcane phrase of a generation passed.

It's time for the young people of
Britain to admit that we were gamed from the
moment we entered school to the moment we graduated; told that hard
work and intellect would be its own reward, that riches would follow rags and then increase exponentially, relative to one's output. If you studied and played
by the rules, you'd get an A*. That A* would get you into a top ten
University, which if you worked hard enough, you could get the first
or the 2.1 you craved. After that, the world was your oyster. It was
only after you took off the graduation robes and the mortarboard that
you realised you were duped! The ball isn't under any of the cups!
The Queen is up the dealer's sleeve! What's more - lots of people are
getting incredibly rich off this elaborate confidence trick and under
the new coalition government's corporatisation of the university
industry they're only set to get richer. Pile in, chaps, Cameron says
Britain's open for business, and business is booming!

It's received wisdom that the most
insecure time of one's life is the year between one's fifteenth and
sixteenth birthday, but in today's economic climate that pales in
insignificance with the sense of worthlessness and stilted ambition
felt by today's graduates. What I wouldn't give to be worried about
my acne and street cred – at least there were trajectory and goals.
The only goals us young adults have now are getting thinner and
thinner and the only people who seem to be able to score and succeed
in life are the ones who were blessed from the outset. Consider for a
second that the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and
the Mayor of London all went to the same school and were all in the
same elitist drinking club at University and you'll get some idea of
the potential you have to succeed on your merits.

I wish there was a hopeful message to
put at the end of this dreary piece, but my aim was to provide some
sense of what I think the zeitgeist of today's graduates is and to
end such a piece with a message of positivity would be kind of
missing the point. One thing I've found extremely interesting
recently is the resurgence of nostalgia for childhood which borders
on the pathological amongst people of my age. There's a fetish for
the 1990s, a revival of children's cartoons, remakes of films which
are barely 20 years old. And why not? What better way to escape the
fear and uncertainty of the life of a young adult today than to
revert to an Edenistic mental state where insecurity meant not
knowing what instant messaging client you favoured? Insecurity is now
more profound and to realise its depth would be to court clinical
depression and anxiety attacks. I can't escape the feeling that we've
transformed into a neo-Victorian society where the aristocracy are at
the throne of wealth and power, and they're not interested in letting
anyone else sit down. Not because they're genuinely malicious,
perhaps, but because, even in an age where information is readily
accessible to even the most soot-encrusted pauper, there are still
those who are genuinely ignorant of the ways in which some people
live and how genuinely impossible it is for those who weren't born
with the silver spoon in their mouths to get some decent cutlery.

The longer we dwell on
our misfortunes; the greater their power is to harm us
- Voltaire